Food safety is no joke, and the Hawai‘i Department of Health (DOH) means business, something Pancho & Lefty’s Cantina & Restaurante in Kailua-Kona learned the hard way. After multiple critical food safety violations, including the presence of live and dead cockroaches in ready-to-eat foods and on food-contact surfaces, DOH pulled the plug, issuing a red “closed” placard that's as serious as a stomach bug. Last Thursday, August 7, Pancho & Lefty’s was served with this shutdown notice and won’t be serving another taco until they clean up their act.
The violations observed at the establishment were, to say the least, unsettling. Beside the roach rendezvous, the inspector found equipment, and food-contact surfaces that were not clean to sight and touch, a handwashing sink playing hide-and-seek under a pile of whatever, and refrigerated foods playing footsie when they really should've been keeping to themselves to prevent cross-contamination. Oh, and there wasn’t a Certified Safe Food Handler on site, a pretty basic expectation for a food joint.
To get back in the DOH’s good graces, and certainly before getting back in business, Pancho & Lefty’s has to toss all contaminated food, summon a pest control exorcist and share their holy water—excuse me, the service report—with DOH. They'll also need to scrub-a-dub-dub pretty much everything and retrain their employees on food storage etiquette. Plus, they have to make sure a certified safe food handler is always at the party. Only then, after a follow-up inspection by DOH, might they flip the open sign once more.
According to the DOH, this isn’t just about one restaurant's oopsy. It’s about keeping Hawai‘i’s residents, and its tourists, not in the bathroom, but on the beach where they belong. It's serious stuff—educating workers, regulating establishments, investigating foodborne illnesses, and doing whatever it takes so these incidents don't pull a rinse and repeat.
